social minds, crowdsourcing, societal objects, pattern recognition

1. Friedrich Hayek’s vision 1936, 1945
(‘Economics and Knowledge’, 1936)
&
(‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’, 1945)

2. The problem which we pretend to solve is how
the spontaneous interaction of a number of
people, each possessing only bits of
knowledge, brings about a state of affairs in
which prices correspond to costs, etc., and
which could be brought about by deliberate
direction only by somebody who possessed the
combined knowledge of all those individuals.
(‘Economics and Knowledge’, 1936)

3. How can the combination of fragments of knowledge
existing in different minds bring about results which, if
they were to be brought about deliberately, would
require a knowledge on the part of the directing mind
which no single person can possess? To show that in
this sense the spontaneous actions of individuals will,
under conditions which we can define, bring about a
distribution of resources which can be understood as if
it were made according to a single plan, although
nobody has planned it, seems to me indeed an answer
to the problem which has sometimes been
metaphorically described as that of the "social mind.“
(‘Economics and Knowledge’, 1936)

4.  the peculiar character of the problem of a rational
economic order is determined precisely by the fact that
the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must
make use never exists in concentrated or integrated
form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and
frequently contradictory knowledge which all the
separate individuals possess. The economic problem of
society is thus … a problem of how to secure the best
use of resources known to any of the members of
society, for ends whose relative importance only these
individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of
the utilization of knowledge which is not given to
anyone in its totality.
(‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’, 1945)

5. If we can agree that the economic problem of society is
mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the
particular circumstances of time and place, it would
seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left
to the people who are familiar with these
circumstances, who know directly of the relevant
changes and of the resources immediately available to
meet them. We cannot expect that this problem will be
solved by first communicating all this knowledge to a
central board which, after integrating all knowledge,
issues its orders. We must solve it by some form of
decentralization. But this answers only part of our
problem.
(‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’, 1945)

6. We need decentralization because only thus can
we insure that the knowledge of the particular
circumstances of time and place will be promptly
used. But the "man on the spot" cannot decide
solely on the basis of his limited but intimate
knowledge of the facts of his immediate
surroundings. There still remains the problem of
communicating to him such further information
as he needs to fit his decisions into the whole
pattern of changes of the larger economic
system.
(‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’, 1945)

7. “Fundamentally, in a system in which the
knowledge of the relevant facts is
dispersed among many people, prices can
act to co-ordinate the separate actions of
different people in the same way as
subjective values help the individual to
co-ordinate the parts of his plan.”
(‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’, 1945)